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"Could be tougher than that," Lucas said. "We've been doing histories on all the women who got the drawings, and so far we've pretty much come up with zip. We got matches, of course, but nothing that looks likely."

"We're setting up a task force, Wisconsin… Minnesota, FBI. We'll run down every single possibility. We'll have all the manpower we need," Baily said. "I talked to the director this morning, and he made this the number-one priority nationwide. Nothing else comes first."

"Terrific," Del said. There was a tone in his voice, and when everybody looked at him, he said, "No, I mean it. I really… mean it."

LUCAS AND DEL left the site twenty minutes later: nothing to do that the professionals couldn't do better. McGrady promised updates by telephone, and Lucas told Baily that he would talk to Rose Marie about setting up a liaison to the task force. "Probably gonna be a sergeant named Marcy Sherrill," Lucas told him.

When they were on the road, Lucas looked at Del and said, "That was pretty swift of you, that 'terrific' you laid on Baily."

"Ah, the FBI's a bite in the shorts."

"Baily ain't bad," Lucas said.

"No, he's not. But I can see that he's building a machine, and I've never been much of a cog."

"You're more like a flywheel," Lucas suggested. "Or an air brake."

"You know what I think? I think we better get back and start cross-matching what we've got. I'm not saying this is a competition, but I'd like to be the ones to catch this asshole."

"I hope there's not a nine."

BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas spoke briefly with Rose Marie, filling her in on developments, then suggested that Marcy be made liaison with the joint task force. "Give her a little exposure," Lucas said.

"She could wind up getting her ass kicked," Rose Marie said.

"You don't know her well enough to know how unlikely that is," Lucas said. "But I'll tell you what-I really don't want to do it. If I've only got six months left in the job, I want to spend my time running around town, chasing this guy's ass."

Rose Marie got Marcy on the phone, told her to stop down. When she did, Rose Marie said, "You've been unanimously elected as our representative to the joint federal-state task force that's being set up. You've also got to coordinate for us, but I don't see how that could be much of a problem, since you'll mostly be doing the same stuff."

Marcy nodded. "Thanks. I'll do it. Anything else?"

"Go with God," Rose Marie said.

Out in the hall, Marcy said, "If you fixed this, I appreciate it." Lucas opened his mouth to reply, but she held up a finger. "You're gonna crack wise, but you don't have to. I appreciate it. Period."

Lucas shrugged. "So all right."

"If you're gonna spend all your time running around town, why don't you figure out why we're up to our ass in Catholics?"

"Maybe I'll do that," Lucas said.

THE ARONSON TEAM had been compiling names and addresses, and cross-checking them. Out of a couple of thousand names, they'd found forty-four matches, and were trying to check the matches. "The problem is, there's only one person who comes up more than twice, and that's Helen Qatar, who runs the Wells Museum over at St. Pat's. She comes up four times."

"Catholic school," Lucas said.

"Helen Qatar's a semisedentary sixty-five," Black said. "She couldn't strangle a fuckin' gerbil. Even if she could catch one."

"Still a whole bunch of Catholics."

Black lowered his voice to a whisper. "And guess what? The guy directing the investigation for the City of Minneapolis is a Catholic."

"Lapsed Catholic," Lucas said. As he looked through the sets of matches, he saw nothing that looked like a pattern. Finally he asked, "Who talked to Helen Qatar?"

"I did."

"Show her the pictures?"

"A couple-she didn't recognize the style. She's pretty… old. I didn't roll out any of the vaginal extravaganzas."

"She's in art and she's named four times, and she's a Catholic."

"You want me to talk to her again?"

Lucas thought for a moment, then said, "Nope. I'll go talk to her. Get me out into town."

ST. PATRICK'S UNIVERSITY was on the south side of Minneapolis, south of the Lake Street bridge along the Mississippi, and directly across the river from St. Thomas, its bitter intellectual, political, and athletic rival. Twenty buildings, mostly redbrick, sprawled along the west bank of the river under cover of six hundred oaks and a thousand maples, the maples replacing the elms that had dominated the campus before Dutch elm disease.

Lucas lucked into a metered parking spot a hundred yards from the Wells, got his file off the front seat, bought two hours of parking time, and walked across the street to the museum. The Wells was redbrick, a little newer than most. The floors inside were a shiny brown composite, but Lucas could hear the floorboards creaking beneath the brown stuff. It felt, he thought, like a college should.

Helen Qatar's office was at the far end of the building, behind a door with a translucent glass panel and a gold-leaf number 1. A heavyset secretary was reading a newspaper when Lucas stepped inside. She looked up and said, "Are you Mike?"

"No, I'm Lucas."

"Do you work with Mike?"

"No, I'm a police officer. I was hoping to speak with Miz Qatar."

"That would be Mrs. Qatar," the secretary said. She leaned toward an old-fashioned intercom, pushed a button, and said, "Mrs. Qatar, there's a cop here to see you."

A perfectly tinny voice came back: "Is he good-looking?"

The secretary looked at Lucas for a second, then said, "He looks like he probably cleans up pretty good, but he also looks like he's got a mean streak."

"Sounds interesting. Send him in."

Inside, Helen Qatar was also reading a newspaper. She had once been a very pretty blonde, Lucas thought, but her fine skin was now a dense map of tiny wrinkles. Her eyes were a perfect china blue behind a pair of small rectangular reading glasses. "Close the door," she said. "You're Lucas Davenport."

Lucas said, "Yes" and closed the door.

Qatar put down the newspaper and said, "Denise and I always read our newspapers at the same time in different rooms. She takes the news rather seriously." Lucas didn't know what to make of the remark, and smiled politely. Qatar took the reading glasses off and put them on the desk. "I talked to that nice gay man you sent over earlier. Is this about the same topic?"

Lucas frowned. "Black told you he was gay?"

"No, no, I surmised it. Is he still in the closet?"

"Technically. Everybody knows, nobody mentions it. Makes life easier."

"Do you have a lot of homophobes in the police department?"

"Probably about the usual number."

"Ah. Well. Is there something else I can help you with?"

"I can't say, really. Black explained all this about the drawings to you, and if you've been reading the paper you know about the burial ground down in Goodhue County."

"It's appalling," she said, turning her chin up.

"We believe the drawings and the killings are connected. We think that the killer has some special relationship with Catholics. We have one witness who might actually have met him, who said that he may be a priest-and this was without knowing that an unusual number of these victims were Catholic."

"Why would a priest kill Catholics?"

"Well, it could be something very simple-perhaps the overwhelming number of people he meets are Catholics. But we don't know that he's a priest: There's just one guy saying that, and he's not exceptionally reliable. There are other things that make it unlikely… We think he may at one time have been associated with a state university, which would be unusual for somebody who not much later became a priest."

"Unless he already was, and was doing advanced study," Qatar said.

"We don't think that was the case. We think he was still pretty young. Anyway, what I'm here for-we're intensely interviewing these people who got the drawings, and we're researching the pasts of all the people who were killed. We're looking at address books and checkbooks and Christmas cards and everything we can find. Your name has come up four times. A lot of other names have come up twice, but you're the only four-time winner. So you have something… something in common with the killer."